Hard
by Roadstergal
Summary: Hard times with hard light. Ficlet, mild slash.


Rimmer spends most of his time as hard light these days. Useful, as he wasn't in soft-light form. And irritated.

Initially, the hard-light was magnificent, brilliant. After so many years as nothing more than a projection, with no interaction with the outside world beyond hearing and sight, and, for some perverse chemo-sensing built-in hologrammatical convention, the extremities of smell… well. To be able to interact with the outside world physically, to have touch and taste returned, was a delight. When they left Legion's domain, he would sneak out of his bunk on Starbug once Dave fell asleep and run his hands over every surface on the ship, relishing the tactile input that was once again his. And it was in the course of these late-night orgies of sensation that he realized that hard light did not bring him closer to his old human self. The first thing he noticed was the homogeneity of the sense. The human body is varied, with blunt physical sensation in places and immensely fine sensation in others - such as the tips of the fingers. But Rimmer's hard-light body is at the humming peak of sensitivity everywhere, the same fingertip-fine sense of touch in every molecule. The clothes he wears are as much a shield from the constant barrage of physical input as from any sense of modesty - and his body does not become tolerant to chronic stimulation, as a human body does. After four hours in the control room, even the temperature of the air is still announcing itself as a blaring fanfare.  
But another difference came to him, slowly, as he grudgingly and peevishly became used to the hard-light body. The human sense of touch, he remembers, is filtered through the mind, and is affected by the mood - but his sense of touch feeds directly into his brain with a clinical detachment that Kryten would envy. Indeed, the android is the most pleasant of the crew to touch - the smooth perfection of his syntho-skin is a delight to a brain fed past satiation with sensation. If he managed to forget the fact that every human woman in the universe is currently dead, and consider actually having sex with one, he recoils at the thought of the painstaking survey that his body would take of every hair, every whitehead, every wart, every wrinkle on her naked body. He has the proof of it; his one attempt at self-abuse as hard light resulted in a shriek that had Dave out of his bunk and halfway to the door before fully waking and cursing Rimmer for a sleep-disrupting smeghead.

Yes, Lister. The slob, the drunkard, the layabout, the disgrace to humanity, the festering snotty carbuncle in the right nostril of the Space Corps. Yet, as the years fall by, and all of the conventions that Rimmer had held so dear - hierarchy, directives, public acclaim, accolades, swimming certificates - fall away under the ceaseless pressure of loneliness, knowing there is nothing Out There that he could ever relate to as a fellow being, the barriers between them fall away, and they are two men huddled back-to-back against a hostile universe. Under these conditions, only love or death can survive, and Rimmer sometimes stays awake late into the night, tracing the lines of Lister's face as it falls unguarded in repose, considering what it would be like to stroke that cheek with his hard-light hand, kiss those lips with his hard-light mouth. But it always leads to the inevitable conclusion - it would be horrible. His body will not allow him to be swept away by torrid passion; his lips and hands will relentlessly feed him dispassionate data. So he lies back on his bunk, and converts to soft light - where he is only his conception, and can touch himself the way he did as a human. The way nobody else can touch him anymore.

And when Lister is awake, sometimes Rimmer silently curses his own sharp, cruel, petty tongue. But he never reins it in, knowing that it is all that keeps him and Lister at arm's length; that delicate balance of love and disgust, respect and ridicule, that keeps Lister going. Yes, indeed, Holly chose perfectly when he resurrected Rimmer.  
For Lister, at least.


End file.
